Fear Of A Black Opening Weekend

The Best Man Holiday
is a success. That is not particularly a
“surprise.” It did not
“over-perform,” nor did it soar for a
“race-themed film,” as USA Today originally wrote. To
speak of it in these terms reduces The Best Man Holiday to
thousands of frames of low expectations. It existed and won. As
a film, it was 50% an above-average comedy and 50% an abysmal
drama. But financially—the only metric that matters to studios—it
was a knockout. Set in the present. Not filmed by Tyler Perry. Of
which you can expect to see more.

Malcolm D. Lee’s movies, in fact, have nearly all been
significant earners, from Undercover Brother to Scary
Movie 5. Only one—Soul Men, starring Samuel L. Jackson
and Bernie Mac—did not
perform well. It was also Lee’s most expensive movie, and was
released three months after Bernie Mac died.

The Best Man Holiday, the director’s seventh film, cost
$17 million and has already earned just north of $30 million on its
first weekend. It premiered to an audience that was 87% African
American and 75% female.

On its surface, The Best Man Holiday is successful black
men in expensive suits saying I love you and praying to God. Taye
Diggs plays Harper, a best-selling author and NYU professor who has
fallen on hard times. (In the first film, set in 1999, he’s just
about to become a famous writer, thanks to Oprah.) His friends are
now accomplished football stars, marketers, headmasters, and
powerful TV executives. There are cameos by a Token White Boyfriend
who spends his winters skiing in Vermont. The film’s characters are
summoned at the start to spend a week celebrating Christmas as a
family. When the cast convenes at Morris Chestnut’s mansion for the
holidays, everyone laughs and talks about blowjobs. The screen
becomes littered with gorgeous topless men. Later, a sex montage is
tenderly scored by Nat King Cole’s loin-numbing “The Christmas
Song”; you can’t win them all.

Unfortunately, the majority of the film’s comedy lies in its
first half. People eat, drink, and are caught interacting
one-on-one in easily misread moment after easily misread moment.
The film is happy until it is sad. Very, very sad. Everyone
cries. The characters cry. The audience cries. I cried watching
Monica Calhoun lose herself in a rendition of “O Holy Night,” with
which my theater audience of hundreds sang along on opening day.
There are plot twists and complications and adversity, throughout
which the thrust of the remains firm: family can cure all.

Or at least certain family
members can. The women of The Best Man Holiday fare much
worse than their male counterparts. There’s the exceptional chef,
whose skills have no apparent bearing on the financial health of
her existence. Another is a housewife who literally cannot rest
until two primary male characters settle their differences. Yet
another woman is a former stripper whose history, blown up on
YouTube, costs her husband a $2-million endorsement for the school
they run. There is a sex-crazed “Real Housewife of Westchester” who
is chastised for her voraciousness by the film’s Lothario, Terrence
Howard.

Nia Long plays the sole powerful woman, whose boyfriend at one
point states he loves the whole “strong, independent, Olivia Pope
thing,” but feels as though sometimes she doesn’t need him. “I
don’t,” she says. It is phenomenal, until her tough exterior is
branded a weakness by the others. (Eventually, she realizes… that
she loves him!)

Taye Diggs’s character, the titular best man, is consistently
unbearable. He is reduced to an anxious, desperate schemer. His
best scenes involve interacting with his shrewd literary agent.
Unsurprisingly, the agent is exasperated by Diggs’s lack of social
media presence and his new, complicated manuscript. “People want
140 characters—not 140 characters.”

The film’s superhero arrives in the form of our host Morris
Chestnut, as the gridiron star Lance, for whom God, family, and
football reign supreme. There is virtually nothing the beautiful
family man can’t do. In some ways, it is an accomplishment for Lee
that Lance’s invincibility becomes insufferable only within the
last 20 minutes of the film, where Chestnut miraculously delivers a
baby. A breech baby. In an SUV. With his bare hands. In a
snowstorm. In traffic. On the day of a funeral. In space. Fighting
dinosaurs. Making waffles. For God.

It’s another episode of Whose Black Film Is It Anyway? In
this case, the movie belongs to an audience that has traditionally
turned out in droves to see Christian-themed, family-oriented
depictions of black life. And yet there is no denying the relative
media-based isolation of ventures such as The Best Man
Holiday, specifically with regard to music and television. In
1999, The Best Man soundtrack had The Roots, Maxwell, Lauryn
Hill, Eric Benet, Meshell Ndegeocello, Ginuwine, and Tyrese. This
year’s soundtrack features R. Kelly doing “Christmas I’ll Be
Steppin'” and Mary J. Blige with the equally unmemorable “This
Christmas.” Within the film, the musical high point occurs while
watching the male cast members lip-sync New Edition’s “Can You
Stand The Rain,” released 25 years ago. No surprise that 63% of
audience members this weekend were also over 35.

The Best Man stemmed from a sitcom era that yielded
“Living Single” and “A Different World,” sketch-comedy as diverse
and influential as “In Living Color” (hi, current iteration of
“SNL”!). It preceded the year of Love & Basketball. It
followed the year of Rush Hour, He Got Game, Beloved, Bulworth,
Dr. Doolittle, Enemy of the State, and yes, Woo and I
Got the Hookup.

It is worthwhile comparing the differences in era. I Got the
Hookup—made for about six dollars, produced and written by and
starring Master P, was released in 655 theaters. This year’s The
Inevitable Defeat of Mister and Pete—directed by George Tillman
Jr., who produced the Barbershop franchise hits of 2002 to
2005—played in 147. The best black film I saw this year, Gimme
the Loot (which won the Grand Jury Prize at last year’s SXSW)
was released in
10 theaters. The highly acclaimed Mother of George? In
eight. When the black films with the widest release are ones about
slavery, servitude, and the
slaughter of black men, it is not a renaissance we are
experiencing—it is resignation.

This all-or-nothing approach is accompanied by another classic
variety of commercial consolidation. Kevin Hart, comedian and
reality star, appeared in no fewer than three of the trailers
before the showing of The Best Man Holiday.

When critically acclaimed black independent films are squeezed
deep into the margins, wide release black comedy-dramas are forced
to serve as the middle ground between them and the biopics and
period pieces. It’s a lot of pressure, and the compromise appears
to be stark binary choices in film fare. That’s how we get The
Best Man Holiday. What new black comedy-dramas may need isn’t
the next Spike Lee or Tyler Perry, but the next
Yvette Lee Bowser or Debbie
Allen, people perhaps somewhat more willing to create an
authentic dialogue with their art from start to finish instead of a
sermon at their audience or its pocketbooks.